Rawn Shah is Director & Social Business Architect at Rising Edge. He has been an active explorer and advisor of collaboration and culture in online communities and across organizations as a journalist, a gamer, a content marketer, a business process strategist since before the advent of the Web. In prior roles, he has led collaboration strategy and transformation efforts in the IBM global enterprise focused on employee enablement, marketing & sales business processes, technology, policy, and ethics. He is a prolific writer with over 500 articles published in print or online in Forbes, CNN, JavaWorld, LinuxWorld, Advanced Systems, among dozens of others technical and business publications, and is the author of seven books, including "Social Networking for Business" (Wharton School Publishing/Pearson, 2010). He currently writes business-technical blogs on Forbes, LinkedIn, and rawnshah.com. He can be reached on various social channels linked from http://about.me/rawn

Work Is Broken; Let's Hack It

Just passing Labor Day in the USA makes an excellent time to consider something we all know and feel instinctively: Work is fundamentally broken. I used to think it was just a little chipped in the corner, so we turned it around to show another face and pretended no one would notice. No, it is not just chipped. It is not simply a large unsightly-but-innocuous crack. It is wholly broken through and through.

Managers, academics and pontificators like myself have been gluing together the pieces for ages trying to pass it off as whole to others. Sooner or later a butterfly flapping its wings will shatter the entire illusion of structural integrity. First, we will sit around gob-smacked that it could even happen, and then we will look for someone or something to blame.

The problem isn’t in any particular piece. It isn’t in the baking process, nor in the glazing. It would be easy to blame the quality of the ingredients–the people involved in the work. We can scurry about looking for better quality ingredients to see how they settle into the system, but that only asks us to start over or redo some of it. What is wrong is in the binding agent that holds it all together.

Any guesses on that binding agent? Is it management? Perhaps. More accurately, it is how we manage our work. Rather than looking the problem laying with the workers or with the management, I look at it in terms of the holistic system of how we coordinate and execute work. Before I offer an explanation of what that means, we should look at what this pain means to us.

Companies are certainly running faster, but not getting further with all that speed. In fact, companies are dying faster and organizational performance has been deteriorating for decades, regardless of economic or cyclic conditions. Since 1965, Return-on-Assets of US firms has fallen 75%, according to the Deloitte Center for the Edge’s Shift Index report. Companies have tried to avert this, however as the report indicates:

“The long-term trend is still an underlying reality and there is no reason to believe that these short-term adjustments, achieved largely through significant layoffs, mark a reversal of the long-term trend…

Layoffs and other short-term measures taken by firms are largely the cause of the recent uptick in ROA. As performance pressures mount, firms are reacting by taking short-term measures and pushing hard on employment and payroll as the principal cost-cutting levers. While offering short-term relief, current efforts taken by firms to eliminate jobs are not sustainable drivers of firm performance going forward.“

Organizations and workers alike continue to suffer headaches of a matrixed cross-boundary work environment. According to the IBM Global CHRO Study Working Beyond Borders, a “number of boundaries—functional, cultural, geographical, generational and informational—constrain workforce productivity and prevent enterprises from realizing their full potential.”

Workers are in pain with complex, overwhelming, matrixed responsibilities. Employee engagement in the workplace continues to fall when they consider their employer’s loyalty to their “most-valued-assets” simply as lip service. In turn, employees continue jump from company to company seeking greener pastures. The Gallup State of the American Workplace study (2013) shows a continuing trend:

“While the state of the U.S. economy has changed substantially since 2000, the state of the American workplace has not. Currently, 30% of the U.S. workforce is engaged in their work, and the ratio of engaged to actively disengaged employees is roughly 2-to-1, meaning that the vast majority of U.S. workers (70%) are not reaching their full potential — a problem that has significant implications for the economy and the individual performance of American companies.”

Figure 1: Why Organizations Need to be Transformed, according to the Stoos Network (from their site)

Figure 1: Why organizations need to be transformed according to the Stoos Network (from their site)

Even this diagram may not include everything that seems broken. The challenges and issues emerge in many shapes and forms. I would welcome any stories and views you might have on this plight of the modern organization to help us complete an even more thorough visualization.

When employees are no longer engaged and invested in their work, they simply phone it in to collect a paycheck. There is a reason that people say TGIF and not TGIM: most employees aren’t looking forward to going back to the grind of 9-to-5. The hours worked in a day is progressively getting shorter in Western countries according to Harvard historian, Niall Ferguson, in his TED talk The 6 Killer apps of Prosperity. What we all know but isn’t said is that some of the work in a day is shifting to off-hours. Increasingly, today’s knowledge workers face a constant reality of always being at work mentally by being available via their smart phones and home computers. The nostalgic 5:30pm Happy Hour with Colleagues has been replaced with the 7:30pm Check-Work-Messages-While-At-Dinner and the 10:00pm Respond-to-Work-Messages-Before-Tomorrow.

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Thanks! Interesting point that ‘Adapt’ is missing from Empiricism. Bringing Agile thinking into the academia-corporate-startup loop could help address the underlying linear thinking, that (looking at Steve’s draft) appears to be a strong contributing factor….

@rawn thanks for some great references and needed attention to a crucial issue. When I was reading this post, my mind kept flashing back to the assembly line because I think that is still the over-riding design principle of “work.” I call it butts in seats. It is task-oriented, not outcome-oriented. I observe that the solution, for a major part of the 70% is MORE flexibility, which would probably seem counter-intuitive to many managers who may feel like “cracking down.” Let employees decide how to do the work, after giving as few constraints as feasible. Here’s another idea I’ve been noodling for some time: think totally beyond the “employment” paradigm to a relationship-based, er, relationship. Firms that focus on connecting with people with certain interests, drive and creativity will profit from the connection by interacting with them online, pre-employment. They encourage employees to connect with people in public networks, so employee networks survive employment. They continue the relationship with alumni post-employment. Connecting with people who matter (this is relative, of course) becomes an end in itself. I call this “Alumni 2.0″ I think IBM benefits hugely from its policy of encouraging IBMers to get out there publicly. Do they encourage people, at an individual level, to stay connected afterwards?

Outcome-orientation is a good start. You consider the work in the unit as a black box and look only for the outcomes and output. Although it doesn’t exclude the possibility of linear task-oriented work within the black box. This kind of modular thinking is a step forward in terms of breaking down the responsibility, but keep in mind assembly lines are likewise still run as modules. One group makes the transmission, another the body, another the wiring, etc.

IBM still has their Alumni community, the Greater IBM Connection, for several years now where they do just as you describe. I’m not involved but I have known some of the team behind it.

Thanks for advancing these thoughts and provocations Rawn. Perhaps our research, and the organizing principles there from regarding the core issues (aka: the quality of work relationships) may aid those who seek optimal hack@work: www.relationsresearch.com (see Durable Relationship™ white paper link and also www.rpPaQ.com).

thanks Rawn Interesting article pointing to work increasingly being a mindset rather than a place or time of day. So with this “always on” work mindset we see employees feeling overwhelmed and increasingly dis engaged. What can employers do: examine how to bring work life integration into the organization as a strategic initiative not just an employee perk. lots to talk about…